38. Perceptual strategies

Monday, June 3, 2024

4:30 a.m. When I realized, yesterday, that one of the reasons for 3D life is that it teaches the experience of living with sequential processing, it felt like a giant lightbulb turned on. It connected so many things, most of them unspoken. I’d like you to spell out some of them, if it does not interfere with whatever else you have in mind.

That was one of those intuitive leaps that are possible only via this ILC process, because, you see, it needed the reasoning mind to be active on another channel while you were actively linked intuitively.

That sounds like you are saying, using the whole brain.

It has taken you since 1989 or so to reallocate your mental processing to embody Monroe’s admonitions, but yes. The connected use of serial and parallel processing, or sequential and gestalt, or reasoning and intuition. You were given two means of perception for a reason. Some cultures teach you to use them correctly, effectively. Yours did  not, but its one-sidedness did serve a purpose. The difference in perceptual strategies is one difference between your current civilization and the one being born. The times have rolled around, and new possibilities are active.

By that, we do not mean that no past civilization enjoyed the use of an integrated approach; we mean to say, merely, that first there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was.

I resisted that sentence, recognizing it as a quotation from Charles Sides’ blog entry of yesterday, but I got that this is what you wanted. Care to explain?

No two civilizations are the same, just as you can’t step twice into the same river. Two cultures using identical perceptual strategies but separated by eons of human experience will be far from identical. They may recognize one another’s kinship, but they will be different in many ways.

As opposed to the idea of “progress.”

Yes. It isn’t a movement from lower to higher (nor from higher to lower) except in certain respects. Different cultures are different experiences, not stages of growth or declines. Each culture will be better able to express some things and less able to express other things.

Here we finally come to where you tell us what you meant by (I had to look back to recall the phrase) psychic interpretational structures!

Is it not clearer, from what we just said?

Perhaps it is. But, pray tell us.

[A pause of a few minutes. It felt like my brain was in idle.]

When we figure out how to approach the subject, it will probably have to involve bullet-points. And as an initial attempt at formulation, it is likely to be clumsy. But, here goes:

  • You as an individual see the world in a unique, non-repeatable way. Each of you, necessarily, as a result of your individual journey in 3D and your “past” journeys (your strands’ journeys) in their portion of 3D.
  • You also see the world somewhat as your family does or did, and your various groups to which you belong – race, class, geographical area, etc.
  • You see the world somewhat through the filters shared by your political and economic and ideological community.
  • Implied in all this is a larger, less visible, filter shared by your times. Imperial Japan and Communist Russia and revolutionary Ireland and the various societies coexisting in the 1930s, say, or the 1960s, or 1990s, all to some extent saw things through what you might call the astrology of the times. The same cosmic energies affected them all.
  • Confusingly, you and everybody, all the time, are also affected by the patterns being broadcast within you by your various strands, each of which was formed in different circumstances and is experiencing different “weather” in its own time, while you are experiencing your weather in your time.

Can you feel the tremendous complexity of it? Is it surprising that an overview of human life would be characterized by what Monroe called M-Band noise?

He described it as cacophony made up of endless numbers of patterns and rhythms. That sounds like a way of seeing what you are expressing.

There you go. And every one of you has to find a way to make sense of it all, usually by filtering out most of it.

And I get that you do too!

Nobody’s capacity for input is endless. Just as Thoreau said you are all provincials in the universe, so might we say it of us in the non-3D, tied as we are to you in the 3D.

So we have to decide what we are going to address, even before we address it.

That is a clumsy way to put it, though no clumsier than our own approach, perhaps. But yes, that is the problem. You – and we – continually have to decide to judge what we have not yet encountered. “Judge,” of course, meaning “perceive,” not “condemn.”

In our case, in 3D, I’d expect that we are being guided by our non-3D component. But in your case – I’ve asked this question more than once; I remember Rita asking it, early on – are there hierarchies in non-3D, thus providing you with a relatively wider view, a relatively wiser source? And as I write that, I see yes, of course there would have to be.

If you keep in mind that there are no hard and fast divisions in the world, you can also remember that there are, necessarily, relative divisions, relative concentrations. Always there are wider associations and narrower, wiser heads and less experienced ones. It’s all in what you tune to, what you experience.

And perhaps now you can see that in order to make sense of the world that is flowing into our perceptions at any given time, we employ strategies, whether effective or ineffective or in between. And if we need to, how much greater the need for your end of the equation! You are at the same time experiencing 3D reality (time-slices) and continuing to experience non-3D reality to the extent that you remained open to it, or reopened access to it.

And you can’t be doing it – as you often put it – horseback. You can’t be reinventing the wheel at every moment.

Ah. So we create or anyway employ structures.

Certainly. Most of life is structuring. Much of the difference in people’s experience of life centers on how fluid or rigid the structures they choose to adopt.

Our psychic interpretational structures.

Correct, and that is where we will resume next time.

You thought you’d have a hard time bringing the idea across, but it doesn’t seem to me you did so badly.

Yes. We smile. This is akin to your saying, “That wasn’t so hard,” you not having to do the work. But yes, it did clarify fairly smoothly, as it turns out.

Till next time, then, and our thanks.

37. Learning to create

Sunday, June 2, 2024

4:35 a.m. Okay. Care to proceed?

Perhaps the hardest thing for people to remember, as they pursue such questions, is to continually apply the rule, “Man is the measure of all things.” When you come to  questions that are beyond your conscious experience, ask yourself how it is with the life you know. You will sometimes go wrong because you will draw a bad analogy, but generally it is a reliable guide. So when you ask, “What is the purpose of life? Why can’t we begin at a more advanced level? What purpose does 3D life serve abstractly as well as individually?” look for understanding toward the life you know. Scale it up, scale it down, and try on different analogies.

Specifically, why can’t you start off at the point you eventually reach? That was your question yesterday.

It isn’t a silly question, though it can be read that way. What I meant is, why does every 3D soul have to go through the long learning and growth process that we call life? Why are we born ignorant and helpless?

If you will look at things differently, it will seem more reasonable, even obvious. You are discontented because it seems so wasteful a process, not to mention painful or uncomfortable at times. But what if you look at new life as new potential, rather than looking at it as endless reruns? Instead of thinking, “Oh, this again,” and imagining life to be tedium, think of it with a child’s eyes and see it as, “Oh, a new day, filled with possibilities.” Think of it as an artist’s sea of potential, a craftsman’s bench of tools and repertoire of skills to learn. Mostly, think of it as an absorbing task to be accomplished, an important role to play. Why in the world would you expect to be up to the task before learning how to be up to the task? And what fun would it be to begin at the same level you intend to continue at?

All I can tell you is, it doesn’t always feel that way.

But the feelings are part of the story too. Just as there isn’t only one role in a play, so there isn’t only one mood in a life, or only one kind of reaction to an experience, even if the experience is as vast as life itself.

So take this and draw your analogy to the life to come. In a way, you will be born into a new life after your 3D life is over, just as that life itself was something you had to be born into. That is, you will again be a new unit experiencing life.

I take that to mean, our newly-fledged life as a unit (a permanent combination of previously disparate strands) now living in new circumstances.

Yes, and rather than our spelling out analogies to your life in 3D, beginning as a physical baby having to learn the ropes, then as a child exercising and learning greater abilities, etc., we leave it to you to think about, depending upon how interesting you find the exercise. But just as your 3D life will look different depending upon the questions you bring to it, so your non-3D life.

Anent that: No two babies ever come into life identical in background and potential and intent. No, not even identical twins. Everyone’s life is a puzzle or an exercise for the person itself to figure out. Know only that it is literally impossible for anyone’s life to be meaningless, because the meaning inheres in the living. You are here to report on the life you make, and you are to make the life you want to make, so how can you fail to do that? “Make the life you want to make” does not mean, “Have what you want to, become what you want to, experience what you want to.” For one thing, which you? For another, which want? For a third, there is a difference between what you aim at and what you hit.

Should you think it will be any different after 3D? Should you think you will be any different after 3D? It will be and it won’t. You will be and you won’t. Analogies are never exact but good analogies can be instructive. “Think on these things,” as Edgar Cayce used to say. The thinking will orient you to experiencing mentally what you intend.

That needs to be better said, but it is an interesting insight. You just said our thinking on a subject – mulling it over – helps create a pull toward what we already know at another level. It helps make conscious what had been unconscious, or, as you put it, what we have been unconscious of.

Yes, and consider it in connection with what we have told you of the value of meditation and other ways of stilling sequential mind chatter so that you may move into gestalt processing. These wordless moments can bring you toward experiences that can only be experienced wordlessly. That doesn’t mean they can’t be talked about; it means the thing itself exists only beyond the realm of sequential processing such as language. And what is the value of 3D experience?

An experience of living with sequential processing!

Correct. That isn’t the only value of 3D life, obviously, but that isn’t the least important, either.

Feeling for your meaning here: Are you implying that the ability to live in 3D mode is somehow of value in non-3D?

You have conceptualized it in other terms. We have stressed that 3D allows you to learn to process things in tiny bites, and to experience cause and effect in delayed sequence. This was to reinforce you initially; that is, to enhance your sense of self-worth and purpose, for all too many of the more sensitive people are prone to feelings of futility. But saying, “You are here to choose,” though absolutely accurate, is not the whole story. Even adding, “You are here to experience, and to report your experience,” is not the whole story.

We are here to learn to create.

First to be created; then, to observe and absorb the process of being created; then to realize that “being created” can be restated as “helping to create” (which is what choosing is); then to move from apprenticeship to journeyman status.

As always, I find it hard to realize that I didn’t always see this, it is so clear now as you say it. But until you did just say it, I never put together “Here to choose” and “Life more abundantly” and “Creator gods.”

So you see, it isn’t wrong to say that 3D life is a school, but it is woefully inadequate. Life is an apprenticeship, and a trade school, and on-the-job training, and an artist’s studio, and an absorbing task. And more, of course.

Put that way, it certainly renders irrelevant most of the complaints about life that people offer. “Why is there no peace on earth, why is there pain and illness and suffering of so many kinds, why is there injustice, ” blah, blah, blah, as if this world were the only thing that counted.

It counts as preparation, but only in the way that boot camp counts, or schooling counts, or experience at anything counts. Its nature and objectives must be properly understood, if life is to be understood.

Now, be careful not to go off the deep end. The recruit in boot camp is still living each day. You can’t say that day counts only as preparation. Every day anywhere and anytime is itself, and is the result of what preceded it, and is the forerunner of what is to come. So don’t devalue each day per se as “only preparation.” Cherish the moment, even if the moment is painful. When you learn that, you will be a little farther ahead in your quest for mastery.

And no two combinations of strands begin at the same place, because the strands themselves were different combinations.

Exactly. So everyone’s experience is different. Should this surprise anybody? You see it all around you.

Our thanks as always.

 

36. Working from our true center

  1. Working from our true center

Saturday, June 1, 2024

4:10 a.m. All right, do we resume with what we do in 3D, and might do?

Remember, we are out to describe you as creator gods, rather than spectators at a tragedy or comedy. Also rather than heroes or villains. It’s all more nuanced than that.

And eventually you are going to get around to describing psychic interpretational structures.

We haven’t forgotten, though the term keeps eluding you. But try to relax. We know what we’re doing, and it isn’t up to you to drive the argument, or keep it on track.

Yet I do get the sense that my keeping track does help somehow.

It helps you connect with us, but not for the reason you think. Let’s say it helps you find us, helps you get to where we want to go. It helps you to put your concentration on the place in the argument where we are.

You’re still not quite saying it. It seems to be a matter of resonance with the idea, somehow, rather than with you as conduits of the idea.

That’s a way to put it. A geographical analogy – and only an analogy, of course: If the information of the day is in Cleveland, and you begin by assuming we are going to be in Atlanta, it can cause some inefficiencies. It is worse, of course, if you are east of our desired starting place and you insist on going farther east (or north or south). That is, you may think of it as a three-part process. You in resonance with us and we in resonance with the material. The closer the resonance, the easier to convey information. So, keeping up with the argument doesn’t necessarily give you a sense of where it’s heading (though sometimes it does), but it does give you a way to anticipate where we are.

But this is describing process.

Useful  sometimes. We don’t intend to dwell upon it. A simple way to hold it in mind is, you don’t do brain surgery by thinking about sports, nor do you do well at sports if your mind is on music or international events. For efficient transfer of understandings, nothing beats focus.

Now, to continue. You have absorbed the idea, presumably, that each of you may be considered to be a specialized communication device between 3D and non-3D. You experience input from either side; you produce output to either side. Through you, the non-3D knows your 3D experience. Through you, your 3D component receives instruction, guidance, help, from non-3D. You are links between the two conditions, 3D and non-3D. and of course this is not limited to humans. Everything, by nature, reports to non-3D on its 3D life, and expresses non-3D vitality to its 3D component. Rocks, trees, kangaroos, humans, energetic 3D forms unsuspected by you: You are all part of the same 3D trance, you are all participating mind-stuff.

Just as there is continuous interaction among 3D creatures, so there is continuous interaction between 3D and non-3D.

How else could it be? You are all the same thing. We are all the same thing. Of course there is continuous interaction. Nothing is static, nothing is disconnected.

Well, this is one more reason for you to see yourselves not as isolated 3D ego-selves, but as inherently connected non-3D-and-3D selves. Your center of existence is not the ego, nor is it the part of you that is beyond 3D. it is between the two. The Self that Jung described is not a non-3D abstraction, nor a 3D time-and-space-limited thing encased by a physical body. It is between the two; it is neither-nor and both-and. If you cannot change your definition, you will not be able to change your perception, probably. But if you do change your definition, several unconscious assumptions will fall away, and you will be living a life with greater possibilities of everyday magic. Perhaps we shouldn’t use the word “magic,” as the word may lead you unconsciously away from the everyday-ordinariness of what we’re meaning. Yet, magic it is, next to the limitations imposed by wrong definitions.

Do you want life more abundantly? You will prevent yourself from living it, if you insist on defining yourself as smaller than you are. Yet you will equally well stunt your growth if you try to see yourself in impossible ways. Aim too high, too fast, and you will be trying to believe something that the rest of you insists (silently, perhaps) is only a pleasant fantasy.

If I understand the sense of what you just said, it is that at any stage in our growth, we can move so far and no farther. We can easily grow too little, but we can also fail to grow by trying to take larger steps than we are ready for.

You may look at it as a process of self-education, only remembering that everyone starts off from a different place, with a different mixture of aptitudes, experiences, drives. But you never go two steps ahead. No matter how big or how small the next step, you can’t skip it. You may take several steps in such rapid succession that they seem like one giant leap, perhaps, but you only get from A to C by absorbing B.

Thus, our long and tedious exposition of so many facts of life, lest anyone miss a step essential to their particular development. (Of course they will have their own non-3D assistance as well.) It is never a matter of your memorizing anything. In fact, memorization would deter. It is a matter of your coming live the information, and that requires time and attention. How much time, what form of attention, varies by the individual, but the necessity is a constant.

And, just to remind you that it isn’t “all about you,” remember that the non-3D is affected by how you each and all develop. We have a vested interest in our creator gods awakening to their fuller potential. As far as we are concerned, the sooner the better. It isn’t like we have an interest in keeping people ignorant and disconnected.

But how is it that that’s where we seem to start? I have long wondered, why the long process? Why can’t we start off however it is that we wind up?

We smile. You want to begin the footrace at the final tape. You want to get the PhD first and go to school afterward. You want to begin as a grown person without having been baby, child, teen. You want to be a Z without having experienced A through Y. Does any of that sound reasonable?

It sounds like somebody sputtering because he doesn’t have an answer, or doesn’t have an answer he wants to admit to.

Yes, we suppose it does. Well, let’s put it this way: Life is about the journey, not only about the destination. If we needed to know what a fully realized being looks like – well, we have seen fully realized beings. But if we wish to see the process by which newly created combinations become fully realized beings, how else can we do that but by setting things in motion and observing? Yes, we participate, but so do you, and we all learn as we go. Or, let’s say, not so much “learn” as “experience.” There’s a difference. You can experience without learning, though it isn’t particularly desirable. You can learn without experiencing, but only at the risk of the learning remaining theoretical, encapsulated, you might say, rather than becoming part of you.

I get that the most important part of that is the “newly created combinations.”

That’s how the universe grows, after all. Or would you prefer that the whole play took place before you went on stage?

Very funny. Next time?

There’s more to say about your life in 3D and non-3D, and what is being created, and what good it is, and how it works. Mostly “how it works,” as we want it keep it practical.

Our thanks as always.

 

35. Clarifying 3D and non-3D

Friday May 31, 2024

4:15 am.. let’s go to town. How we get to turn 3D conditions to advantage?

A little more than that: how you get to live as the creator gods you are. It isn’t about making the most (or the best) of 3D. it is about letting 3D make the most – the best – of you.

Turning it on its head, moving the center from 3D life to the greater life of which it is a part.

Not quite. That isn’t wrong, but the emphasis is wrongly placed. Just as “Man was not created for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man,” so man wasn’t created for the 3D, but the 3D for man.

Boot camp. Or a gymnasium, so to speak.

No, no, wrong idea still.

Well, we’re open to instruction.

You will remember that Jung came to realize that in centering yourselves on your ego-awareness (that is, what you are conscious of), you were making a mistake, that your true center is the Self, the total being, not the localized part of it. Well, similarly, we have been showing you that the same “centering in ego” could be described as “centering in 3D,” and is as off-center that way: You are 3D and non-3D beings. But once you have been created into 3D, it is as wrong to think of yourselves as non-3D-beings-only as to think of yourselves as 3D-beings-only. So to call 3D boot camp is to think of it as a transient experience a 3D being must go through on its way home to non-3D.

You never stop surprising me. That is pretty much how I do think of it.

And that is a 3D perspective speaking, you see.

I didn’t, but I do now. Only by identifying with the 3D personality could we think of it as “being created, living in 3D, then dying and being set free to live in non-3D again.”

Exactly. Where is the movement coming from? Think about the non-3D part of that proposed scenario. It would be living in non-3D, cut off or connected or semi-connected to the part of it that was in 3D, then reconnected to the formerly separated part. But think, now. The 3D individual is made up of many strands. All those strands: Did they necessarily come from the same larger being, as you are conceiving it? If –

No, we need to regroup. This is a vert fruitful subject, and needs to be taken carefully.

I could feel myself getting in the way, involuntarily trying to reason it out.

And that’s what we want all of you to learn to do routinely, to reason rather than merely accept – but the reasoning must be deferred until after the receiving, if the process is to be able to continue. First perceive, then analyze.

I know that, of course. The reasoning in this case was sort of involuntary. I was trying to see how to make sense of what you were giving us.

Let this stand when you transcribe. Rather than an interruption to the argument, it may serve as example that your minds work on more levels than one, and sometimes you have to consciously suspend peripheral operations if you wish to focus tightly on things. That is what hypnosis does, sedates all but one level of operation, only in that case it is bypassing the will and in this case we wish the will to be engaged, and the reasoning faculty, but in smooth coordination with the perception-enhanced channel.

Well, try again and I’ll try to let it come through unfiltered. To me, it always feels like I have to be willing to write nonsense, which is why sometimes the reasoner comes in uninvited. But I do know enough to try again.

We can always discuss and you can edit. Very well, we were saying, you in 3D are combinations of strands. New combinations; that’s the point. Hence you did not exist in non-3D in your present form, and now you do. If you try to keep this straight while thinking of yourselves as individuals, you won’t be able to do it, for you will be silently mixing categories. But to think of it from an all-inclusive viewpoint won’t be easy for you. You probably will have to settle for a vague sense of it, rather than any image as definite as “going back to the non-3D like a homecoming.”

Begin not with 3D but non-3D. It isn’t one unit (so called) that contributes strands, because we don’t exist in units in the same way you do as separate bodies having separate experiences. We are more like sentient clouds, not differentiated but able to be considered separately. And of course, therefore so are you.

If you will think of us in non-3D as all one thing, instead of thinking of us (as your 3D analogies continually tempt you into doing) as bodiless individuals, you will begin to see the difficulties in your thought this causes. Logic says A and B and C contribute to form D in 3D, and D when it leaves 3D rejoins – what? A? B? C? Two or more of them? It could present a tangle of theoretical possibilities, but it’s all wrong because the assumption of non-3D individuals is wrong..

It is hard for you to keep in mind unconsciously as well as (occasionally) consciously, but in non-3D as in 3D, all is one. This doesn’t mean everything is homogenous; it means there are no absolute boundaries nor fixed positions, just as is so for you mentally (because, of course, your “mental” is your non-3D component).

It is as misleading to think of us as absolutely separate, though we may be relatively separate, as to label clouds A, B, C, etc. They can be perceived as separate and you could perhaps even say they sometimes function separately – some bearing rain, some providing shade, some appearing as a mere haze – but in nature they are the same, and should they drift into each other, the mixing is seamless and subtle, and, really, meaningless, for the only difference among them was one of temporary appearance and perhaps immediate function.

Did we not tell you, early on, that when you talk to non-3D, different voices fade in and fade out, usually without your noticing?

I begin to see that ex-3D souls may function as focusing devices.

Very good! Very good. Indeed you do, and that’s one of the functions of 3D, to provide training for just that focus, for what is focus but self-identification?

I can’t hold in mind the journey we have made here today. The best I can do is remind us that you said you were going to discuss us as creator gods.

Don’t you think it might be helpful for you to begin with the right idea of who you and we are? The primary reason it is so hard to get through these concepts is that there is so much background to explain, and so few people (relatively) who are willing to take the time. It doesn’t lend itself to bumper-sticker slogans, and when it does, the slogans tend to be true but misleading, or true but opaque.

“All is one. All is well.”

Not to mention your one-time favorite whipping boy, “On the other side, there is no time.” Now, you need to be able to put these things into short pithy statements. “God is love.” “Love is all there is.” But what is meaningful to one who has gone through the explanatory process and come to it as a boiled-down precis is not necessarily meaningful to one who comes to it cold. Worse, it may convey entirely incorrect meanings because of 3D reasoning about what it seems to say, and therefore probably must mean.

For us to discuss you as creator gods, we need to have you bear in mind so many things, now reducible to shorthand, but how much exposition was required to reduce misunderstanding? We won’t list them, and your difficulty in enumerating them ought to tell you that our “get smart slowly” program has its reason behind it. You can’t remember all these things. You must have come to embody them, for them to guide you.

 

So, for now, concentrate on thinking about your situation. You are made up of strands of ex-3D beings; these provide you the specific points of focus that are shaped by your time and place of birth and are affected by your early upbringing.

When your 3D existence ends (seen from a 3D time perspective), you yourself are ex-3D. like other ex-3Ds, you recognize that you are:

  • what you were “separately” before 3D (the strands haven’t gone anywhere; they still have their relatively separate existence), plus
  • what you became (that is, the 3D person you just shaped), and
  • the extension of the non-3D that you never ceased being.

If we in non-3D are not what you might imagine, well, neither are you. For one thing, you are one of us. For another, you still do not quite understand what you’re doing while in 3D, nor what more you might do.

 

We’re out of time. I take it we will resume here?

Probably. Let’s see how the moment feels.

Very well. Our thanks as always.

 

34. Redefining who we are

Thursday, May 30, 2024

5:30 a.m. I think we can proceed now. We’ll see.

Seeing yourselves more as process and less as artifact will help you get the sense of temporary form that is more like bounded energy than like a physical object as it appears.

Fluid, not solid. Energy, not solid form.

That’s the idea. You will remember that Buckminster Fuller said “I seem to be a verb,” and defined human life as a sliding knot in a rope.

I didn’t understand what he meant, but I am beginning to. We are patterns, although we experience ourselves as solids.

Yes. If all 3D reality is mind-stuff slowed into an appearance of solidity and relative permanence – well, you are part of 3D reality, are you not? You could hardly be more solid than your surroundings.

Obvious as you say it.

So, not the rope but the slipknot, not the ripple or even the water, but the pattern of the water. You are far more temporary than you experience yourselves to be, and far more superficial – in the sense of being a phenomenon on the surface of things.

You are saying we are riders, but I’m not sure what we are supposed to be riding on.

This is a very good lead-in, if we can find a way to phrase it. You try – use what comes to mind – and we will criticize.

Funny how well that works sometimes. Okay, well, we’re riding the moment, clearly. Sometimes we’d like to get off, but this particular amusement park doesn’t offer that option.

Riding the moment is true enough. Try again, find another possible image.

I suppose we are riding the momentum of whatever we’ve been doing. We are always at the far end of our life to date – by definition – and that means we are reacting to what we have done, what we have made ourselves. Every moment has its own self-definition, you might say.

Another way of saying “riding the moment.”

Yes, I suppose so. Do you need more?

Perhaps not. The sense we want to give is that you are transient, yet are definitely shaped during that time. You are slow-motion shape-shifters, you might say. You change continually, yet in that very changing is a continuity by which you recognize yourselves and recognize each other.

And why is this important? Because again, you tend to over-emphasize your permanence and solidity, and under-emphasize your transience and fluidity, just as (and for the same reason that) you overemphasize the “realness” of 3D and underemphasize the “somewhat realness.” Merely by changing the emphasis in your mind, you can change your possibilities.

Now, changing something in your mind is not as simple as deciding to change it. Change cannot come by an intellectual (or abstract) decision alone. If the emotional body (as Monroe called it) is not engaged, nothing changes. This doesn’t mean it is an emotional decision in the sense of hysterics or even excitement. It means, the change goes deeper than an intellectual decision.

I almost get where you are going. It is a picking up of some threads and a laying down of others, and somehow the emotional body is required.

The real sense of it is not that the emotional body is required: it is that all of you, not only part, is required. Self-divided people do not make effective changes. It is only when you come to a point – when you are exactly in one spot – that you change. Sometimes an “external” crisis is required, before you can be concentrated; sometimes it comes as a result of fast or slow willing growth, but it’s like the old song, “all of me,” not merely some of you.

You should be able to see that this is a good thing. It prevents you from going off half-cocked fifty times a day. In fact, it is a s light exaggeration of the function 3D provides in the first place: slowing things down so they may fix.

It is a balance, you see. You are fluid but while in 3D you experience yourselves as relatively solid, relatively slow to change. If you remember that both halves of the contradiction are true (as usual), you will see how to better take advantage of your condition.

This is what you’ve been working toward! At least, that’s how it suddenly strikes me.

Yes. Our emphasis is always on the practical, it’s just a deeper layer of practical than most people will stay still long enough to absorb. We want you all to see, 3D is an advantage, not merely an ordeal. “All is well” not because everything is as we or you would want it, but because 3D is providing you with what you need. All of you, all the time. The obstacles, the pain, the striving, the achievements, the frustrations, the yearning, all of it. But it works better if you don’t fight it. And fighting it is a continuous 3D temptation.

Well, doesn’t that mean that temptation is part of the show, that it comes with the territory?

It does, but we are pointing out that complaining doesn’t serve you. Feeling like a victim (which says, “I’m helpless and this has nothing to do with what I am”) doesn’t help. Wanting to change doesn’t help. Praying for an outside agency to drop salvation of any kind into your lap doesn’t help.

What does help is your intent, and nothing hampers, impairs, intent quite as much as a sense of helplessness. Even a state of resolute courage amid adversity, though admirable in its way, does not really help, though it does stop things from getting worse. What helps is faith that somehow “All is always well,” that you are the center of your universe, that your life has meaning and is important.

And if we absorb your redefinition of what our lives are, we will have greater chance of living as if All is Well until we get to actually believing it.

That’s what faith is, is it not, evidence of something believed in but as yet unseen? And doubt is that same middle position, only facing toward dis-belief.

Now, if you are a transient phenomenon riding the moment, the center of your universe, among others in the same situation, this is a very fluid situation, you will concede. Add to it that every moment connects to every other living moment and your chessboard now extends vertically as well as horizontally. And all the points in every plane are free to decide, all the time. Do you wonder that we sometimes describe reality as a flickering light-show?

Can you see how this more nuanced point of view is more accurate than those constructed as though reality were solid, fixed, slow to change, relatively disconnected?

Oh yes.

Well, get as firmly as you can the sense that your 3D life – right now, and it is always right now – is a pattern, a sort of shape, and is not an object nor a fixed portrait nor a permanently written page. You are not a puppet, nor a victim, nor a perpetrator, nor the ultimate cause of the good and evil that flows through your lives. Once get this firmly in your being – that is, not merely as an idea, but as a felt reality – and you come that much closer to realizing yourselves to be the creator gods you are.

Ah. We get to turn 3D conditions to advantage, rather than having to fight them.

Precisely, and that is where we will resume next time.

Well, this is always very interesting. Our thanks as always.

 

33. The non-3D and individuality

Wednesday,  May 29, 2024

4:55 a.m. Very well, shall we continue? The filters as they function, you said.

Suppose for the moment you consider 3D reality as having as its purpose the creation – the enablement – of uncounted points of view. Think of it as a unity expressing every bit of itself separately, for whatever reason. Can you think of a more effective way to do that than to temporarily suppress the awareness of unity and have each shard fend for itself in what seems to be an external environment governed by its own laws?

We aren’t quite saying that reality is this way; we are saying, as so often, that it may be profitably seen this way. This is one valid way to see it. For as long as you stay within this vision of things, consider that these things are true, but in the back of your minds, remember that there are no absolutes to be had while in 3D, no matter who you are talking to.

If you are setting up a system for enhancing (indeed, for producing) so many individual points of view, you will want to set up automatic mechanisms to do so. The alternative would be to have to keep your attention on the mechanisms all the time, or to allow things to proceed chaotically. But it is useful – if you must personify the creator and maintainer of the world – to think of it as both artist and scientist, both dreamer and mechanic. If you want to soar, and to enable others to soar, it is best to establish the rules of flight, so you don’t have to carry people separately.

The metaphor is getting strained.

It is. Suffice it to say, the world functions within rules: not arbitrary fiats, some emperor’s command, but mathematical laws (indeed, mathematics itself).

This is why we had you intuit three factors that create and define individuals in 3D:

  • The interaction of the strands that have combined to produce the new soul.
  • The cosmic conditions that allow certain traits and relationships and suppress others.
  • The 3D social interactions that provide initial beliefs and assumptions.

They aren’t the only factors that could be cited, but a complete list is not important; we want to give you a way of thinking about things, and these will do. Once get the idea, and you can carry it as far as it interests you to do so.

All right, I’m getting that you want us to think of cosmic clockwork (the influences symbolized by the movements and relationships of planetary bodies) routinely, regularly, altering conditions. At any given moment, particular combinations of strands will find it propitious to enter 3D. (I don’t know the laws or limits, but I’m gathering that there can only be so much variance between what “the stars” allow and what the psychic mixture is.) And once the new soul is in 3D, it is enmeshed in a network of beliefs and values that it takes on as givens.

Yes. And this is your starting point, you see. This is how we triangulate individuality, you might say. The same psychic mix in a different society or a different time would have an entirely different type of experience. Different psychic mixes placed into the same society at the same time will be different. Et. Cetera. As we say, if you assume that the goal is to produce myriad viewpoints, this is a very good way to do it. And of course – obvious but easily forgotten – this could not be done in non-3D, for how are you going to limit consciousness? Yet at the same time, you in 3D connect to non-3D, so why doesn’t leakage destroy the desired condition of isolation and amnesia?

Collusion, I imagine. Our non-3D component is careful not to disorient us?

We smile. Not quite so simple, or where does the ability to develop relationships such as ours with you arise?

I wait, and what comes is a sense that this has something to do with conscious and unconscious.

It is one aspect, yes. You got the sense of it, as you started to write the previous sentence. Can you  tease it out?

It needs a better image than came to me: I got a stone splashing into still water. But I know what it meant. If we as individuals are ponds of water, our conscious awareness may be compared to a small circle such as would surround a stone’s plop.

Yes, and everything outside that circle is unknown to the specific state of awareness that is inside the circle. This image has the advantage, too, that there is no need to determine if the circle is surrounded by its own private pool, or is shared with other circles, or for all you know, is millions of circles in a vast sea. The individuality of it is the circle caused by the momentary disturbance; the commonality is the area outside the circle which cannot be and fortunately need not be defined. And, as a bonus, the image allows for the possibility of ripples from each interacting with one another, to reinforce or interfere, or pass unnoticed.

Within the image, consider that what you call the unconscious mind (which, we remind you, we consider every part of your mind of which you are unconscious) controls most of the automatic functions of your life: your health, your guidance systems, your cruise control. You may look at this as the non-3D supporting its 3D component. But this image of a temporary circle caused by an event that defines it away from its surroundings also has the advantage of not requiring definite fixed boundaries, which, we assure you, do not exist in nature.

I take you to mean that this is why we can learn to extend the boundaries that are effective for us. We can grow without having to change our nature (which, for all I know, would be impossible). We can choose to be aware of more of the surrounding opacity.

You can follow the ripples out, yes, until you reach whatever limit is set by time and place and desire. But you see, the barrier between 3D and on-3D was never more than provisional. Once the 3D soul has established itself so that too much awareness too soon wouldn’t overwhelm it, there is no reason it shouldn’t remember while in 3D that it is also in non-3D. and after all, what else have we been doing, these many years, but nudging you toward that awareness?

You are sort of changing the rules of the game.

More like moving the goalposts. The next civilization will see how it can do with a wider interdimensional awareness. Given how much intellectual power it has attained, it is going to need non-3D guidance if it is to survive.

And that’s what you (in general) have been up to for the past 60 years or so, helping prepare for a different way of experiencing life.

You could safely say we’re always doing that. It is the same thing, by the way, as saying, “We’re always on Plan B.” It isn’t some master plan, it is a set of goals to be moved toward while all the players are exerting free will, some more consciously than others. That’s the chaos within the plan, and the plan within the chaos.

“Games within games,” as Monroe had somebody describe 3D life.

Enough for the moment. We are still moving toward explaining the phrase that tantalizes you.

And that I keep needing to look back to remember. “Psychic interpretive structures.”

We’re getting there. Take a little time to sample the visual metaphor of a circle of ripples in water, caused by the entry of a stone. Remember, you aren’t the ripple, exactly, nor the water. You’re more like the transient phenomenon that is the circle formed within the ripples.

That’s cryptic. Very well, our thanks as always.

 

32. Three defining factors

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

3:35 a.m. Yesterday’s session started quite a few hares running. I am still pondering the meaning of “psychic interpretational structures.” But you said we should begin today with the three factors I mentioned as limiting our view of the world as we come in. that is, the factors that provide the initial filters through which we see the world. What came to mind was our heredity of strands, the astrological conditions prevailing when we were born, and the beliefs accepted by whatever society we are born into. Thinking it over, these still seem valid.

As we said, a good place to begin.

  • Your inheritance via strands. This is merely a special case of your over-all heredity. Physically you inherit your body, and that presents limits and opportunities. Mentally, emotionally, the same, for it is all one package. But then add to this physical heredity – which Yeats called your inheritance of race – the other inheritance, which he called your inheritance of soul: your “spiritual” limits and potentials. These come from the strands that make you. You might accurately say, you inherit ideas, attitudes, values, vulnerabilities. None of it is destined, in the sense of being rigidly and permanently fixed. But, like your physical heredity, it is a set of limits and possibilities that shape you.
  • The astrological conditions. This would have been much better understood by the educated of many centuries ago, when it had not been relegated to the ranks of superstition. Because its nature and functioning are not widely understood today, the “scientific art” will need to be studied in order to see why a natal position will play out seemingly arbitrarily, to those who are not aware of the ground-rules. Year by year, a person’s life is a sort of moving interference pattern. That is, the birth-time (and place) conditions “set.” They fix. The rest of the person’s life is an interaction between that set pattern and the continually changing patterns it encounters day by day. If you were born on January 12, 1876, say, your pattern set, hardened, to the conditions prevailing at that moment; then that pattern encountered the conditions –the cosmic weather, so to speak –every moment thereafter. Obviously, every moment will produce a different interference pattern. We could go into this at some length, and perhaps at some time we may. The point here is twofold: 1) Life presents as an unending series of changes along regular determinable patterns, and 2) Everyone’s interaction with those patterns is structured by their time of entry.
  • Societal constraints. Clearly, a person born at a given time into the United States will meet different conditions than a person born at the exact same moment into China, or Peru. Your family, your clan, your fellow citizens, all have unconscious and conscious beliefs that they inculcate into new arrivals. We don’t mean deliberate indoctrination: Is it indoctrination to believe and teach that things do (or that they don’t) “just happen,” or that life can be explained best, perhaps only, by the given accepted belief structures, or that God rules the world, or that chance does, or that the world is a set of impersonal laws, a great clockwork?

Any and all of these three types of constraint may be overcome by the individual in the course of life, but everyone, always, begins with limits that are unconsciously experienced, unconsciously accepted. There is no way to shape anything but to limit it. There is no way to accept form, but to accept limits. There is no way to act, to experience, without accepting form, which means accepting limits. Your destiny is what you are born into. Your freedom is what you can do within those limits or can do beyond them.

Some thought will connect this sketch with hallowed beliefs held by people over the ages. Karma, for instance. Can you see that karma could be seen as the new individual accepting the limits inherent in the strands’ emotional patterns?

I think you mean, at the end of a life, we are a certain way, as a result of our life’s decisions, and that pattern becomes part of the life we join as a strand. And of course this would hold for every strand, so the karma of the new individual would be a combination of past karmas.

Or, “unfinished business,” as we once said, but not quite as simple as “One unit becomes another unit, bringing its baggage with it.”

Another example would be, “The stars impel; they do not compel,” a recognition that we are born into patterns, but what we do within those limits is up to us. Astrology without free will would be the ultimate in wasted motion, for what is the good of determining the cosmic weather if there is nothing you can do with the knowledge?

Viktor Frankl said you can at least determine to have one attitude or another toward whatever comes at you.

And that was very insightful of him, for that is your true freedom – hence, your true responsibility. This is how you shape the karma that you will pass along.

And you can see, with a little thought, that societal beliefs create a good deal of variability. Someone born into the Jewish slums of New York City in the 1890s will experience a very different set of expectations and conditions than one born into Beacon Hill in Boston, or Nob Hill in San Francisco, or into the well-to-do or middle class, or the poor of other ethnic extractions in the same city. All these locations will imprint different ideas of the world, just as every moment will imprint different possibilities, gift, disabilities, and just as every strand will contribute psychological patterns.

The point of this analysis of conditions is to provide an understanding of the possibilities provided b the nature of the strands that combine, and the time they initially manifest into as a baby, and the place (physical and mental) they manifest into. As with astrology, if you couldn’t then do something with the knowledge, what use would it be?

Ponder this, because this is a good place to pause,. Think about it, get a firm sense of these three factors as determinants of the unconscious filters you begin with. Then we will resume probably with a look at the filters as they function, all of this aimed at providing you an understanding of what we mean by psychic interpretational structures.

Our thanks as always, for all of this.